Colour makes our lives more interesting — how dull it would be in a black-and-white world! It pleases us aesthetically, entertains us and is useful to us. This unique book aims to describe the scientific nature of colour and light, and how we see it, in an accessible and easily understandable style. The evolution of the eye, science of colour and technical visual systems are all broken down into readable chapters, with clear images and illustrations provided for reference. The book then goes on to discuss the innate tendency of humankind to produce artistic works as conceived, realised and augmented through the use of colour. Focussing on broad forms of artistic entertainment — painting with pigments and dyes, colour and light in photography and cinematography, light displays and colour in television — this book then delivers a comprehensive review of what colour means and has meant in the creative arts.

'Extraordinary. An intellectual feast as well as a visual one' Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes The world comes to us in colour. But colour lives as much in our imaginations as it does in our surroundings, as this scintillating book reveals. Each chapter immerses the reader in a single colour, drawing together stories from the histories of art and humanity to illuminate the meanings it has been given over the eras and around the globe. Showing how artists, scientists, writers, philosophers, explorers and inventors have both shaped and been shaped by these wonderfully myriad meanings, James Fox reveals how, through colour, we can better understand their cultures, as well as our own. Each colour offers a fresh perspective on a different epoch, and together they form a vivid, exhilarating history of the world. 'We have projected our hopes, anxieties and obsessions onto colour for thousands of years,' Fox writes. 'The history of colour, therefore, is also a history of humanity.'

OCPA 2000 provided a forum for researchers from the various subfields of physics to broaden their knowledge horizons. It promoted friendship among ethnic Chinese physicists from all the continents and fostered a sense of belonging to a community with a strong tradition of scholarship and heritage. Ethnic Chinese physicists gathered to review past accomplishments and to consider making further contributions to the world of physics.

Reproduction of the original: Colour Measurement and Mixture by W. de W. Abney

Barry Stroud presents nineteen of his philosophical essays written since 2001, on topics to do with knowing, seeing, and understanding. He discusses the nature of philosophy, sense experience, the possibility of perceptual knowledge, intentional action and self-knowledge, the reality of the colours of things, alien thought and the limits of understanding, moral knowledge, meaning, use, and understanding of language.